Processing Feedback: Introduction

Craft is more than drafting...

Writing has a reputation as a solitary occupation, and that’s for a good reason. In most cases, the act of writing happens between the writer and their writing medium, be that notebook or keyboard, and even if there are other people nearby, they aren’t really involved.  

What this fact hides is that writing often includes, by necessity, other people. Accountability buddies, first readers, beta feedback, developmental edits, line edits, proofreading, all these and more might enter the mix at some point, and they all involve input from other people.  Depending on your project, and whether it’s something you’re doing on spec or under contract, what you do and how it works will be a bit different, but it can be helpful to think about feedback as coming in three broad categories that generally happen sequentially.  Those categories are:

1. Motivation

2. High-level feedback

3. Polish

Your feedback will also come from a variety of different kinds of people who can be roughly classified into one of the following:

• Reader

• Insider

We're going to spend the next several posts going deep on types of feedback and tips for how to use them. In the meantime, take a mental inventory of the kinds of feedback you’ve received and how you used it.  How did you feel about that process?  What worked, and what were your pain points?  Keep those in mind as you read and see whether your understanding of how to engage with similar situations in the future might shift.

If you have particular questions you’d like addressed, drop a comment and let me know!